Friday, August 1, 2008

A New Shakespeare-Related Novel

Winfield, Jess. My Name is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare. New York:  Twelve, 2008.

The New York Times just reviewed—or, rather, its podcast just interviewed the author of—a new novel related to Shakespeare.

All I know about it I learned from the New York Times Book Review podcast. The author is one of the founding members of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, and the podcast and the review stress the novel's comic elements.

It also appears that a secretly-Catholic and State-persecuted Shakespeare is assumed.  As Shakespeare's Catholicism / Protestantism / Agnosticism / Atheism / Puritanism / et ceteraism has been at the forefront of the scholarly debate in recent years, it will be quite interesting to explore its implications in this novel. 

More when I get a copy and look into it!

Links: The publishing house.  The review.

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

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